A total of 126 mistakes about Korea have been found in Japan's textbooks over the past five years, a lawmaker said Monday, showing another example of Japan's continued attempts to distort history.
"Japan distorted the history of 126 Korean Peninsula-related items in its 108 textbooks for primary, middle and high schools between 2011 and 2015," said Rep. Yoo Ki-hong of the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy.
Cases in point include the territorial claims to South Korea's easternmost islets of Dokdo, while misleading students about the March 1 Independent Movement that Koreans launched in 1919 against Japan's colonization of the peninsula, according to the lawmaker.
The Northeast Asian History Foundation, which compiled the data and submitted it to Yoo, has called on Tokyo to correct the errors, but such "requests have simply been ignored," he added.
Over the past five years, the number of schools that have adopted right-wing textbooks has risen by 160 times, he added.
"In 2001, 0.039 percent of schools used right-wing textbooks, but the figure has skyrocketed to 6.3 percent," he said. "It is a telltale example that Japanese society as a whole has been going rightward."
Japan, which harshly ruled the Korean Peninsula from 1910-45, has continued to whitewash its wartime atrocities, including the sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War II and renewed territorial claims to Dokdo, souring relations with South Korea. (Yonhap)
